Why I Hated English Class

A Stodghill Says So blog:
Most of my life has been spent writing. I've written about people and events for newspapers, I've written fiction for magazines, I've written stuff just for the helluva it. All this time there was a little fact hidden away in some dark recess of my mind: I know nothing about the English language.
That isn't quite true. I know a noun is a person, place or thing. That has a nice ring to it so it has stayed with me all these years. I know an adjective . . . well, it sort of describes something, that's the best I can do. If you say, "A big dog," big is an adjective and dog is a noun.
That's the extent of my knowledge. With that in mind I Googled prepositions. Then I Googled conjunctions. I even Googled adverbs. Regular verbs, the fact is I've never been certain about them so I Googled them too. I printed out lists of these things although I'm not sure why. Just something to do, I guess.
So now I've got all these lists and I still have no idea what purpose it would serve to understand this stuff. I'm not going to spend one second pondering whether or not I need to add a conjunction here or a preposition there.
Most of us were subjected to the ridiculous time-waster called diagramming sentences in school. English teachers never saw a sentence that didn't need diagramming so you'd draw a straight line and then little lines branching off from it and then more lines shooting off from the branches. I was pretty good at drawing all those lines, not so hot at putting words on them. I suppose there were some kind of rules that told you verbs go on this line and conjunctions go on that line but I must have been absent the day the rules were laid down.
So what difference does it make? Either you can write an understandable sentence or you cannot. I've always known that and it's a good thing because I just tossed my lists in the wastebasket.
I do wonder about one thing, though. Would I have been fired from newspaper jobs if editors were aware of my lack of knowledge concerning the language? Would all my stories have been deep-sixed by magazine editors? Might they have said, "My God, this man doesn't know his adverbs from his elbows."
We'll never know, will we? Somehow I doubt that would have happened.

Dick,

You know the English language about as well as anyone I know. You know it better than me, and I taught those English classes for over 22 years. You just don't recall the names of things. When I was studying to be a teacher, I was told that students will remember something if they see some value in it; if not, they usually forget it quickly.

Some say that it is fortunate that English teachers no longer teach diagramming, and only give a cursory going over to the names of things. The trend more recently has been to teach English through reading it, and writing about what you read. Very few avid readers have problems with grammar or mechanics in writing, at least in my experience. Some say that we've gone too far in that direction, and sometimes, I think I'm one of them. Still, I've never found an effective way of teaching those basics out of context. The literature textbooks that were finally adopted a couple of years before I retired included supplementary materials that used sentences from the reading selsections to reinforce structure, and teach about grammatical and mechanical rules and guidelines. Modeling good sentences is one of the best ways, IMHO, to improve one's writing. I recall trying to start a thread at the Author Society encouraging modeling. I believe I used a stntence or two from Normandy, 1944 as examples of well-written sentences. Now, I suppose we could diagram a few of them, but would we learn as much about how to write or what makes good writing?

Personally, I think that grammar, mechanics, and sentence structure ought not to be taught until the last years of high school, or in early college classes. During the 80's and 90's, at least in the district where I taught, we reversed the earlier methods, which began with words, moved on to sentences, then paragraphs, and finally, multi-paragraph essays and stories. Instead, we started with longer writings, free-style, then learned about paragraphs, then sentences, then parts of speech, etc.

Individual students learn better from different methods. Teaching structure is very important for young people who do not have a good sense of personal structure and limits, while those whose lives have been overly structured do better when they are encouraged to be more creative.

But the bottom line, from my perspective, is to have students read as much as they can, and follow the readings up by writing about them. Start working with the patterns you see used by the masters, and eventually you will find your own unique sense of structure.

Just an observation.

Ann

A very interesting story, Dick. I don't think you're alone trying to understand the meaning of the grammatical expressions. Once you start to write and do it often enough, you learn how to write without being overly concerned with the grammatical details.
One could make an analogy with driving a car. Learning to drive, especially in the days of the hand shift, and a steering wheel that was not power, and brakes that were not power-assisted, wasn't easy. Then to take the drivers test, learning the distance to keep between cars, how many feet before signaling to turn, etc., etc. After you learned to drive you never gave much thought about shifting the gears or signaling to turn, you just did it without conscious thought.
When I took my drivers test to get my German drivers license I failed the first two times. It was hell. I had driven for more than 30 years, in the USA, Canada, Europe and the Middle East under varied conditions and never had an accident. Now I had to go back to basics and consciously think about every movement I made with someone sitting beside me ready to find fault.
When you can drive, you can drive. When you can write, you can write. When one thinks too much about all those small details it cramps the style and can often make an interesting story dull. I prefer to have a trained professional do the final edit.
This is just one man's opinion.

I just learned that my high school English teacher died recently of
respiratory problems. I thought she had died years ago and I wanted for
her to know that I had written a book. I am ashamed to admit that I was
relieved to know the cause of her death had nothing to do with that.

She was my English/Literature teacher for four years and drilled
diagramming sentences into us. I became quite good at it, but without
knowing what purpose it served. I still don't.

Stephen King doesn't like adverbs, so I try to not use them.

Tangling pronouns was a big thing for me. It still sticks with me when I speak as well as when I write. The only thing I didn't like about English and Journalism classes was outlining. I still hate it.

At a university soon after I graduated from high school, a student turned in an essay. The professor called her up. (No it wasn't me.) Anyway, the professor said, "There are only three high schools in the nation that would have prepared you to write this quality of essay." She had gone to my high school, one of the three high schools.

We didn't do a lot of diagramming, although I did when I taught English for a semester because I thought it might be fun. We read a lot, wrote a lot, were critiqued with honesty and encouragement. I give credit to this school I went to so many years ago for helping me be a writer. We had a huge class of over 500 students, and a number are published writers.

Carol

Phil Whitley wrote:

I just learned that my high school English teacher died recently of
respiratory problems. I thought she had died years ago and I wanted for
her to know that I had written a book. I am ashamed to admit that I was
relieved to know the cause of her death had nothing to do with that.

She was my English/Literature teacher for four years and drilled
diagramming sentences into us. I became quite good at it, but without
knowing what purpose it served. I still don't.

Stephen King doesn't like adverbs, so I try to not use them.

So, Brew, did I do it right?


Ann

Ann,

That is really impressive!

Looks right to me, Ann, except I would have placed "for four years" beneath the verb "was". (Probably wrong).

Man, does that bring back memories!

Phil, I think you might be right about the "for four years" phrase. The more I think about it, it's an adverb, not an adjective.

If I were still in my college Spanish 302 class, I would be required to stand beside my work while the rest of the class pointed out the error.

We also had to go to the board, hear the professor, Dr. Pineda, call out an infinitive, then list every possible conjugation of the verb, in a specified order (It would require the entire board space), then stand beside the work while the class critiqued it and pointed out any errors. Not fun.

Sometimes I'm glad I am English. I've never heard of diagramming. It sounds and looks painful.

Dick,

You can have some fun with this. If you type in a sentence, it will parse it for you (noun, verb, adverb etc.)

http://www.link.cs.cmu.edu/link/submit-sentence-4.html

I typed in this:

This sentence is for Dick to learn about nouns, verbs, adverbs and adjectives.

Try it!

Dear Ann.

All sentence diagraming needed was a big bloodshot eye in the middle with eyeliner all around it and a side view of a big nose in an unlikely place, lips that came off a cow with lipstick, and it would have been called abstract art and sold for lots of money.

Diagraming that math question about the train going fifty mph east and the one going 40 mph west and when they would meet was a nighmare dreamed up by a teacher who hated kids. I knew the answer to the math one was when they ran head on into each other going down the dead end roads of the diagram.
Love,
Betty

I tried it, Shelagh, and it made my headache even worse. The headache began when I actually saw a diagrammed sentence.

Betty expressed my thoughts quite well. I detested math questions like that. No wonder I quit school at the first opportunity.

I never read Stephen King's piece on adverbs but imagine he meant words ending in ly. I find it hard to believe he never uses words such as far, more, less, never, often, only, soon, too, very, well, almost, always. I dug my list out of the wastebasket and found them there. I don't like rules and would find King's stuff pretty dry and boring if he removed all adverbs. I'll bet he often breaks his own rule.

You're right, Dick. It was the LY adverbs that he hates - especially in the dialogue tags.

"Get out of here," he shouted angrily.

Things like that. He called editing them out of your work "Killing your darlings."

Thanks, Brew. I figured that was what he meant.

I never understood the need for diagramming. Especially if you knew how to speak a sentence correctLY. I think the only requirement should be communicating in a fashion that can be understood.

You are so right, Zada (to borrow a phrase from Alice). And that comes back to reading enough that you see the forms so often that you automatically use them in your speech and writing. A few years ago, I saw some statistics that indicated the average student spends about 15% of the time in English class actually reading.

Ann

When I looked at Ann's diagrammed sentence, I started having English class flashbacks and immediately went and had a double Scotch.

I never liked English class and did my level best to keep my natural ways of speaking and writing from becoming spoilt by rules.

Malcolm

Ann

My mother was an English teacher and my daughter is one as well--therefore I love English--I will pass on the diagramming however. Ann does a great job of it--I am proud to know her.